What Edith Eger's The Choice teaches us

Dr Edith Eger is an expert in trauma and a trauma expert. She is around 95 years old, a survivor from the persecution of the Jews during WWII. She was only sixteen when she became a prisoner in Auschwitz for about one year until they were relocated and tortured further along the way towards Nazi Germany in 1945. 

Now that you have a picture of where she's coming from, let me just add that she spent the rest of her life healing from the trauma of the Holocaust and we are so fortunate that she has put it all in writing in her book The Choice. 

There is no hierarchy of suffering

Dr Eger states that there is "no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another". She asks us not to diminish our own suffering and to use her story of extreme horrors as an inspiration to recover from our predicament. 

The idea of greater pain than infidelity, as in heartache, did occur to me as I was in some of the darkest moments past DDay. For me, thinking of the pain a mother feels when she loses a child helped me put my sorrow into perspective. Reading The Choice suddenly took that to the next level. 

It is not about dismissing the suffering from the losses we experience after betrayal, but knowing what other people have endured can work as a soothing balm on our own wounds.

Suffering is universal. Victimhood is optional

Dr Eger cites a few times in the book her mother's words as they were taken to Auschwitz under the uncertainty that accompanied the most unexpected of all cruelties. 

"Remember no one can take away from you what you've put in your mind"

The same night her mother was killed, her executioner asks young Edith to dance at the rhythm of The Blue Danube. She was exhausted and shocked, yet she obeyed out of fear and kept going by making the "barrack's floor a stage at the Budapest opera house". She earns an extra loaf of bread that will save her life later. 

"Even when we were starving, we would feast", writes Dr Eger. 

 She became a Dr in clinical psychology

Thirty three years after being rescued from a pile of dead bodies in Germany, Edith Eger earned a PhD from Saybrook University. She used her experience as an example to inspire war veterans suffering from PTSD and also as a tool to connect with her patients. 

As she studied, she learned and she healed. It is an amazing story, an inspiration to choose joy over misery. 

Dr Eger quotes many of her mentors and teachers and gives hundreds of examples of everyday cases she treated in her practice in over thirty five years. 

This book is a treat for anyone recovering from trauma. 

Dr Eger invites us to make a CHOICE in the present:

• Compassion
• Humour
• Optimism
• Intuition
• Curiosity and Self-
• Expression

She invites us to use the past as a "springboard that helps you reach the life you want now" instead of living in the prison of the past. 

"We have the power to determine how we experience life after trauma"

Thank you for your wisdom, Dr Eger.